Abstract: Assume that each object in a database has m grades, or scores, one for each of m attributes. For example, an object can have a color grade, that tells how red it is, and a shape grade, that tells how round it is. For each attribute, there is a sorted list, which lists each object and its grade under that attribute, sorted by grade (highest grade first). There is some monotone aggregation function, orcombining rule, such as min or average, that combines the individual grades to obtain an overall grade. To determine the top k objects (that have the best overall grades), the naive algorithm must access every object in the database, to find its grade under each attribute. Fagin has given an algorithm (“Fagin’s Algorithm”, or FA) that is much more efficient. For some monotone aggregation functions, FA is optimal with high probability in the worst case. We analyze an elegant and remarkably simple algorithm (“the threshold algorithm”, or TA) that is optimal in a much stronger sense than FA. We show that TA is essentially optimal, not just for some monotone aggregation functions, but for all of them, and not just in a high-probability worst-case sense, but over every database. Unlike FA, which requires large buffers (whose size may grow unboundedly as the database size grows), TA requires only a small, constant-size buffer. TA allows early stopping, which yields, in a precise sense, an approximate version of the top k answers.

Abstract We study a class of single round, sealed bid auctions for items in unlimited supply such as digital goods. We focus on auctions that are truthful and competitive. Truthful auctions encourage bidders to bid their utility; competitive auctions yield revenue within a constant factor of the revenue for optimal fixed pricing. We show that for any truthful auction, even a multi-price auction, the expected revenue does not exceed that for optimal fixed pricing. We also give a bound on how far the revenue for optimal fixed pricing can be from the total market utility. We show that several randomized auctions are truthful and competitive under certain assumptions, and that no truthful deterministic auction is competitive. We present simulation results which confirm that our auctions compare favorably to fixed pricing. Some of our results extend to bounded supply markets, for which we also get truthful and competitive auctions.

We consider online routing strategies for routing between the vertices of embedded planar straight line graphs. Our results include (1) two deterministic memoryless routing strategies, one that works for all Delaunay triangulations and the other that works for all regular triangulations, (2) a randomized memoryless strategy that works for all triangulations, (3) an O(1) memory strategy that works for all convex subdivisions, (4) an O(1) memory strategy that approximates the shortest path in Delaunay triangulations, and (5) theoretical and experimental results on the competitiveness of these strategies.

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This thesis presents "cache-oblivious" algorithms that use asymptotically optimal amounts of work, and move data asymptotically optimally among multiple levels of cache. An algorithm is cache oblivious if no program variables dependent on hardware configuration parameters, such as cache size and cache-line length need to be tuned to minimize the number of cache misses. We show that the ordinary algorithms for matrix transposition, matrix multiplication, sorting, and Jacobi-style multipass filtering are not cache optimal. We present algorithms for rectangular matrix transposition, FFT, sorting, and multipass filters, which are asymptotically optimal on computers with multiple levels of caches. For a cache with size Z and cache-line length L, where Z =# (L 2 ), the number of cache misses for an m × n matrix transpose is #(1 + mn=L). The number of cache misses for either an n-point FFT or the sorting of n numbers is #(1 + (n=L)(1 + log Z n)). The cache complexity of computing n ...

We introduce a natural variant of the (metric uncapacitated) k-median problem that we call the online median problem. Whereas the k-median problem involves optimizing the simultaneous placement of k facilities, the online median problem imposes the following additional constraints: the facilities are placed one at a time; a facility cannot be moved once it is placed, and the total number of facilities to be placed, k, is not known in advance. The objective of an online median algorithm is to minimize the competitive ratio, that is, the worst-case ratio of the cost of an online placement to that of an optimal offline placement. Our main result is a linear-time constant-competitive algorithm for the online median problem. In addition, we present a related, though substantially simpler, linear-time constant-factor approximation algorithm for the (metric uncapacitated) facility location problem. The latter algorithm is similar in spirit to the recent primal-dual-based facility location algorithm of Jain and Vazirani, but our approach is more elementary and yields an improved running time.

We initiate the design of approximation algorithms for stochastic combinatorial optimization problems; we formulate the problems in the framework of two-stage stochastic optimization, and provide nearly tight approximation algorithms. Our problems range from the simple (shortest path, vertex cover, bin packing) to complex (facility location, set cover), and contain representatives with different approximation ratios. The approximation ratio of the stochastic variant of a typical problem is of the same order of magnitude as its deterministic counterpart. Furthermore, common techniques for designing approximation algorithms such as LP rounding, the primal-dual method, and the greedy algorithm, can be carefully adapted to obtain these results. 1

We study a class of single-round, sealed-bid auctions for items in unlimited supply, such as digital goods. We introduce the notion of competitive auctions. A competitive auction is truthful (i.e., encourages buyers to bid their utility) and yields profit that is roughly within a constant factor of the profit of optimal fixed pricing for all inputs. We justify the use of optimal fixed pricing as a benchmark for evaluating competitive auction profit. We show that several randomized auctions are truthful and competitive and that no truthful deterministic auction is competitive. Our results extend to bounded supply markets, for which we also get truthful and competitive auctions.

We present lower bounds on the competitive ratio of randomized algorithms for a wide class of on-line graph optimization problems and we apply such results to on-line virtual circuit and optical routing problems. Lund and Yannakakis [LY93a] give inapproximability results for the problem of finding the largest vertex induced subgraph satisfying any non-trivial, hereditary, property . E.g., independent set, planar, acyclic, bipartite, etc. We consider the on-line version of this family of problems, where some graph G is fixed and some subgraph H is presented on-line, vertex by vertex. The on-line algorithm must choose a subset of the vertices of H , choosing or rejecting a vertex when it is presented, whose vertex induced subgraph satisfies property . Furthermore, we study the on-line version of graph coloring whose off-line version has also been shown to be inapproximable [LY93b], on-line max edge-disjoint paths and on-line path coloring problems. Irrespective of the time complexity, w...

In this paper we consider the unsplittable ow problem (UFP): given a directed or undirected network G = (V, E) with edge capacities and a set of terminal pairs (or requests) with associated demands, find a subset of the pairs of maximum total demand for which a single flow path can be chosen for each pair so that for every edge, the sum of the demands of the paths crossing the edge does not exceed its capacity.